Literature and Revolution

-by Fernando Alegria-

translated by D. Ohmans
(c) copyright 1997

Text imprint - Mexico City, Fondo de Cultura
Economica, (c1970)

Table of Contents
I. Literature and Revolution
II. Portrait and Self portrait:
The Hispano-american Novel Confronted with Society
III. "Der Zauberberg" in the Literature of Latin America
IV. Miguel Angel Asturias, Novelist of the Old and the
New Worlds
V. Alejo Carpentier: Magic Realism
VI. Rayuela: or, Order out of Chaos
VII. Cesar Vallejo: The Mestizo Masks
VIII. Parra anti Parra
IX. Anti-literature
X. Antipoetry
Chapter 10 - Antipoetry
To return to reality, renege on the exquisite, burn the hermetic treasures
of exoticism, to speak of humble criollo things, to uncover meter and
punctuation, to bring Dario off Olympus and seat him before the fireplace or
hang him from a nail in the dining room, as Fernandez Moreno did - none of this
is antipoetry. It is antimodernism. And it is what differentiates poets like
Pezoe Veliz, Lopez Velarde, Barba Jacob, Basso Maglio, postmodernists all four,
and the vanguardists like Huidobro, Borges, Novo, Carrera Andrade, among the
first Latin American antipoets; for Pablo de Rokha and Cesar Vallejo the
revolution of language in poetry in Spanish is no formal phenomenon; it tries
not to re-adapt the language to a new concept of poetry (Creationism). It
tries to be done with the poetry that agonizes drowned in words and return to
the poet the right to express oneself as a person, not as a barrel-organ nor as
a dictionary nor as an air traffic controller (in the down-to-earth manner of
the minimalists), return to them the right to conversation, the right to
confront society and confront themselves to break what is rotten and breeding
in the academies.
The right to conversation is begun to be given to Latin American poetry,
for example, in Ramon Lopez Velarde (1882-1921), not Lugones, nor Herrera and
Reissigni Jose A. Silva, because those came down to the patio of the house,
roamed for breakfast or appeared in bed with a certain Latin spirit, classical,
popularly patrician.
Lopez Velarde takes no part in the conflict planted by Gonzalez Martinez
in his celebrated sonnet. It is not of swans or of owls that he wishes to
speak. It refers, instead, to his first Agueda:
Agueda appeared, resonant
of starch, and her eyes
of jade and her ruddy cheeks
protected me against the awful struggle...
I was a boy
and knew O from the round,
and Agueda who wove
tame and perseverant, in the echoing
corridor, caused me unknown shivering...
(I believe that I even owe her the custom
of talking heroically insane about her).(1)
First contribution of Lopez Velarde to the wellspring of the antipoets:
he narrates. He does not sing, nor does he describe. He explains with
irrational reasons, with which he produces a counterpoint, that is, his poetry
sounds like prose. The effect is deceiving. Lopez Velarde arms conversation
with art and the product is almost handicraft. Not altogether. It cannot be.
Second contribution of Lopez Velarde to the wellspring of the antipoets:
humor. His is not sarcasm; only tender irony, if irony can be tender. Here is
how he addresses "The Gentle Country":
Gentle Country: Your worth is in the river
of the virtues of your womanhood.
Your daughters go forth as in a tale,
or distilling an invisible alcohol,
dressed in the rays of your sunshine,
cross like threaded bottles.
Gentle Country: My love is not for the myth
but for your truth of blessed bread,
as to the girl who nears the gating
with the blouse pulled to her ears
and the skirt hanging on the little bone.
Like the handsome knave, my Country,
on a floor of metal, you live till the day
of miracle, like the lottery.(2)
It is not only the nation that Lopez Velarde softens: he also softens
poetry, removing the patterned mold, the crests, the cosmetics and ribbons (the
precious stones already removed by other postmodernists), he removes the shoes
and socks. He is the delicate disrupter of the turn of the century model.
Huidobro would turn it on its head. Lopez Velarde proceeds with a smile on his
lips, from afar, without compromising himself. His colloquial tone, quickness
and provincial elegance, are more than the swan song for the chorus of Latin
American poetry. After Lopez Velarde it will be relatively easy for Salvador
Novo to say: "Let the lesser ones come to you" and for Carlos Pellicer to
exclaim: "Among all the flowers, ladies and gentlemen, it is the gilded lily
that is most hallucinatory."(3)
The starch has gone out of poetry, and it begins to open and throw off
words, like a globe that quickens. From there to fill itself with another
mission, will take years and that mission will be existential, never more
rhetorical. In Mexico, with Gorostiza, Octavio Paz, and Montes de Oca, for
example.
Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) affirms in "Altazor" (1919):
I am a savage angel who fell one morning
Into your plantations of precepts
Poet
Antipoet...(4)
He says it thinking of his role as royal jester who precedes, giving
blows, "the burial of poetry."
Altazor distrusts in words
Distrusts in ceremonious stratagems
And of poetry
Traps
Traps of light (5)
His own epitaph is simple and decisive: "Here lies Vicente, antipoet and
magician."(6)
What Altazor was this to declare such things? A Dada warrior? An angry
standard-bearer of anti-rhetoric? A true creator of a new language? Or the
great man who strips poetry nude and exhibits it like a woman getting out of
bed? We shall try to define the role of Huidobro to see with a certain clarity
the situation of the first antipoetic wave in Latin American literature.
Formed in the tradition of Modernism (Ruben Dario will come to say:
"between the horizon and your breast will not fit the song of a bird"),
Huidobro in his first period controlled a language of the clearest
gold-smithing, essentially ornamental, of elevated roots and romantic tone.
Nevertheless, he suddenly changed in language, moved by an integral vision of
the revolution in European art. He discovered a value in the colors, the
internal rhythms, the melancholy of a reality always suggested, never directly
expressed, the technical value of the image and the false economy of metaphor.
That is to say, he sought the shadow of symbolism to extinguish the tropical
light of Dario, cut the world into pieces and reorder it like Cubist
calligraphy and the result was the invention of a new rhetoric and a priceless
dynamic consisting now not of allusions to the surrounding environment, but of
superimpositions, collages of the reality characteristic of his epoch; from
there the airplanes, the telegraph wires, the rainbows, planets and cataclysms,
the zeppelins and kings without crowns, the silver cowboys, the dehumanization
of man.
Huidobro came not to bury poetry, but to repair it. He was, in reality,
not an antipoet. He himself was anti-descriptive, anti-sentimental,
anti-urbanist (in the sense in which Chocano was a super-bricklayer, or Lugones
pro-peasant), anti-meter and anti-spelling, all in all; anti-academic and head
of a foursome of brilliant poets who wanted to fumigate poetry in Spanish and
kill its moths in order to replace them with mechanical butterflies. He
recognizes it himself:
The new athlete leaps upon the magical field
Playing with magnetic words...
One must revive language
With laughing sounds...(7)
Huidobro dazzles and disconcerts the spectator of poetry. Magician. The
spectator cannot catch up with the velocity of his images. Huidobro is
concerned with "a lovely insanity in the zone of language," an "adventure with
the language." He says:
While we live let us play
The simple sport of naming
From the pure word and nothing more
Without imagery stripped of jewels...(8)
Skilled in scenery. Because he knows that "the pure word and nothing more"
will not suffice, and from imagery he will serve a royal plate while he lives.
Grounded in the lectures of Bergson, of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine,
Rimbaud, Apollinaire, witness to the Armistice and to Dada, known to Picasso
and Arp, Huidobro is surely the most characteristic (at the same time, the most
brilliant) of the vanguardists of the Spanish tongue and, therefore, the
exclamations of "Altazor" are equivalent to the poetic art not only of
creationism, but also of ultra-radicalism, stridency, futurism and the other
"isms" of the year 20. But let us make a sketch of place.
In Argentina, Lugones had offered an approach to reality that he
considered rustic. His language, nevertheless, did not correspond to that
reality and its image would seem literary, superimposed upon the complex of
classical allusions that served as his pedestal. Nor can Macedonio Fernandez
or Jorge Luis Borges undo the toil of linguistic polishing nor the use of
surprise mechanisms, the inheritance of postmodernist vanguardism. The case of
Borges is more serious because he feels an Argentine reality for which he lacks
expression; he alludes to it and it surrounds him stylistically but he never
manages to speak for it, given that the language of that reality does not
correspond to his experience. This, between parentheses, makes us think of
Cortazar who, in my judgment, suffers the drama of the searcher for real words
who knows where they are and who says them and which destinies they determine,
but upon adopting them they sound like the voices of a song. We deal with both
cases, that of Borges and that of Cortazar, of writers overfed with culture,
tragically disposed to defer to it so as to describe essential acts, the
anti-literary signs of an epoch. The inability to prevail in that task gives
them greatness. Neither Lugones, then, nor Macedonio Fernandez, nor Borges,
will be precursors of an antipoetry; only partisans of a rusticity that, in
contrast with Modernism, sounds beautifully real. One needs to read Fernandez
Moreno to feel that an antipoetic attitude is not only a literary revolt of a
vanguardist nature or a tendency to ugliness, but a proximity to an individual
non-transferable human condition.
The anti-academic position of Vicente Huidobro, it is worth saying, the
abandonment of meter and punctuation, the use of the Bergsonian image instead
of metaphor, the tendency toward abstraction from pictorial nature and a
transcendent conception of poetry and of art in general, make of him a
precursor of a certain aspect of contemporary anti-literature. I refer to what
in him there is of formalism: Huidobro cuts to the word for the object it
represents, but without committing an essential act so that, on stripping the
language of its exterior rhetoric and returning its primordial sentiment, it is
given back its authentic reality. As a natural reaction, it is exposed that it
comes full of an anti-literary mission. The falsified signs will disappear and
the action will appear. The poets will dot their i's and unleash their
calligraphy. Huidobro invents words, exclaims beautifully, deep in the
emptiness of his riddles. He destroys no poetries. He remains in the middle
road of his rebellion. The other half was already run in those years by James
Joyce. What was going to stay at the bottom of the language of which Huidobro
and the ultra-radicals were capable was a very bitter substance. It required
not only magicians, in the style of Huidobro or Borges, to transform itself
into antipoetry, but also the Anti-Christ, in the manner of Vallejo or of
Rokha.
In 1916 Pablo de Rokha (1895-1968) said in his poem entitled "Mood and
Form": "Even my days are parts of enormous old furniture." And he adds, by
way of conclusion: "The man and the woman have the odor of the tomb."(9)
Speaking this way, strictly, directly, De Rokha began to beat upon poetry
with an intent that was, after all, close to Lopez Velarde, to Huidobro and his
ultra-radicals. Naming was an immediate necessity for him. The noun of
animist content, in his case a dreadful passionate content, served for de
Rokha in the place of poetic crime. Abusing the concept, proclaiming the
infallibility of the image, de Rokha entered chaos via a subconscious path and
there where Huidobro was putting up a verse as a luminous warning, he uncovered
a sack of immense proportions from which then fell dialectical stones in
between baroque explosions that blemished for always the clarities of Chilean
neo-romanticism. De Rokha, then, not only entered into Chilean reality from
above, from below and from the sides, not only represented the first Surrealist
attack in our midst, but also used a language that, suddenly, gave reality to
the antipoetic attitude of the vanguardists. De Rokha would say later that he
wrote "as a broken half-brain." In truth, he wanted to say that he destroyed
rhetoric between us with the only true weapon: the language of a broken
humanity and universe, a language not learned, that he carried with him like a
birthmark.
"U," published in 1927, is a key book to verify what I say. A companion of
Huidobro, in the first verse of the poem de Rokha leaves a declaration of
creationist faith. Huidobro had said that the poet was a small god and that
one should not describe the rose but instead make it bloom in the poem. De
Rokha supports that as he can:
I perceive the world coming as image, only as image
I feel, think, and express in irremediable images...
further, I have no conceptual sense...
I do not know - I say,
do not define - I name,
adding to nature.(10)
It is a salute to the flag. In the verses that follow, de Rokha proceeds
to leave inscriptions which represent direct violence against bourgeois society
and against the man accommodated to it. He strips the poetry of all artifice,
except one: grandiloquence. To arrive at his inscriptions it is necessary to
open the way with the machete and cut explanations, exclamations, repetitions,
oratory. What remains is astonishing: with the myth of the beautiful poem
overthrown, with the language freed, with the power of the popular idiom and
divinitory faculty recognized, not analytical, of conversational tone, with the
hybrid value of the eschatological vocabulary accepted, his humor visceral and
his social place primitive, there appears an aggressive condemnation of the
cultural apparatus in which the man has been castrated. I shall cite certain
of the sayings of Pablo de Rokha warning that I have trimmed off the
unnecessary, that eloquence in which he frequently drowned.
They have punctured the divine tires...
In truth, brothers, in truth
the hour of the bald things
is here,
is here,
the hour of the bald things
say the crucified.
Women are a problem with little hairs...
Benedict XV ministers with fallen teats over Christendom.
The false idiots
wet the only walls of the asylum.
The spider grows hair and becomes a philosopher.
The ocean resounds like a bank filled with the public.
Pio Baroja moves the theatre from his belly.
The sultan of philosophy
is three buttons and a testicle (11)
For show, those buttons. Among them there is another language of abstract
temperament, extensive philosophical concatenations and metaphysical
apostrophes, allusions without apparent order to the great historical cycles
and religious systems. De Rokha, like Sabat Ercasty and Armando Vasseur, felt
himself to be a cosmic individual, mover of masses, poet-mountain. On that
plane he unfolds himself so as to organize his system of images and militantly
stick with them and a Marxist position; then, he quits being an antipoet and
his task is national reconstruction and revolutionary agitation. His political
impetuosity is not always equal to the lively patterns of his antipoetry. De
Rokha will continue being a great poet in proportion to the enormity of his
demolitions, not for his harangues nor his "slogans." He shall be that too to
the degree that he expresses the desolation of his last years: see his
monologues over the demise of Winnet.
In 1918, a few years before de Rokha would say "they have punctured the
divine tires," Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) said from atop Dario's school: "There
are hits in life, so strong... I don't know, hits like hatred from
above..."(12)
Vallejo impersonated God, not like Rokha with a stone in his hand, but as
one neighbor to another. Vallejo's eye was strong and moved toward being
cruel. He says:
I am the blind Sierran
who watches through the lens of a wound.(13)
In 1916 de Rokha had said "The man and the woman have the odor of the
tomb." In 1918, year of the Armistice, Vallejo recomposes his speech:
The tomb is still
of female sex and attractive to man! (14)
Vallejo consistently initiates, systematically, a labor of the trenches
into which his life will go. His language, modernist in "The Black Heralds,"
breaks the conventional logical bonds, and adopts free association of images
and follows a bitter tone of conversing with and confronting the false face of
the world, spitting on it, hitting it, distorting it. That face, we assume, is
the image of a mask that Vallejo wears like his crown of thorns.(15) Such that
the process is, at root, self-destruction without rebellion. We have here the
difference between Vallejo and de Rokha. The latter destroys from within and
never feels sorry for himself, attacks, dynamites, shoots, like a soldier on
the ground spraying with shrapnel the area that surrounds him; furious,
cruel, de Rokha is an unleashed power, his poetry an automatic pistol from
which he emits rounds. Vallejo, on the other hand, proceeds laden with an
image of Christ suffering but pious. He goes at Christ's haunches recounting
the human miseries in plain, bald, bloodied language, showing his wounds and
those of his companion, howling in a low voice, depending on the chaos he
produces, not the reverse. Vallejo attacks from beneath, towards the inside,
knowing that man, at times, covers humanity when it lies down to die in the
open. His poetry is a reflexive act, a stone which Vallejo returns to whoever
throws it, be this god or society or man. So many stones are thrown that, at
last, they add up, not for sure aim, but as accumulation. Vallejo wraps the
commiserating tone in trivial colloquial formulas; it is one of his ways of
deflating the poetic globe. He says:
A little more consideration
insofar as it will be late, early...
A little more consideration.(16)
We'll see. That is and no more
We'll see. It doesn't transcend itself.(17)
Sex, mortality, the orders, friendships, the country of origin, the
family, in his poetry lose the institutional aspect and sense; they turn into
very concrete forms of his suffering, his solitude, his sickness; they are
marks on his face and body, wounds and scars. Without ornamentation. For
example:
I think of your sex...
touch the button of speech, ripe in season.
That elastic holding the material in.
Those buttocks seated high.
Today you come I am barely up.
The stable is divinely watered
and fertilized by the innocent cow.
At this my spittle drools, I
am a beautiful person...
Confidence in many, but not now in one;
in the river, never in the current
in the stockings, not in the legs
and in you alone, in you alone, in you alone.
From between my own teeth I emerge steaming,
giving voice, pushing,
lowering my pants...
A cow my stomach, a cow my bowel,
Misery picks me from between my own teeth,
caught on a stick by the cuff of the shirt.
A stone to sit on
would there not be for me now?
I would like to live forever, escaping the belly,
because, as was said and I repeat,
so much life and then never!
Later, I have washed everything,
proud profile, dignified;
I have turned to see what gets dirty,
I have scraped on what takes me near
and have laid out the map that
assented or cried, I don't know which.(18)
One could add to all this, as a compendium, "The violence of time." This
is, then, the antipoetry of Vallejo: a pendulum that, to move, erases itself,
a constant negation of the deed at the moment that it strikes blows at man, a
contrast between existence and non-existence. It is Vallejo's own mode of
self-destruction: to negate the poetry affirming it, to affirm life negating
it as consummate sarcasm and bitter brutality. It is the necessary expression
of someone who has discovered the mechanisms of the trap and awaits the moment
of its springing, reluctant to betray it by hurrying.
Nicanor Parra (1914), speaking of traps, conceives the modern world as a
monumental sewer for hunting rats and men. Before arriving at that conclusion
he says:
I laugh behind a chair,
my face filling with flies.
From his axles man finds the necessary wax
to shape the visage of his idols.
And from the female the straw and dirt for his temples.(19)
That gender and those temples immediately establish the line which unites
the antipoetry of Parra and of Vallejo and of de Rokha. To arrive at the
conclusion that the world is a sewer, Parra performs a prior ordering and
synthesis of vices, crimes, lies, hypocrisies, swindles. He shows everything
immobilized and pathetic as in an ancient comedy of errors. The antipoetic
line arrives at its highest tension. Parra perfects the precursors of
destruction. His talent for synthesis, unequaled in contemporary antipoetry,
permits him to define human anguish in the exact measure of our inefficacy and
impotence.
Parra controls an everyday language mixed with pedagogical formulas and
sentences from popular parlance; it is his warhorse, the same one used by the
anonymous voice who when talking reveals desperation. His antipoetry is the
poetry of the insurance salesman, of the grade school teacher, or the traffic
cop, unionist or secretary, dentist, captain of the army, theatre attendant,
school inspector, zoo administrator, that is, the poetry of respectable and
honest people complaining naked beneath the sheets with as much right as the
bard of long ago who lamented crowned with laurel above the sheets.
Like Breton, Parra too speaks of a violent coupling that, joining
obscurity and clarity, will produce antipoetry. Parra needs clarity to provide
a concrete image, not wholly logical, although sufficiently rational, but more
absurd and eccentric, of the human condition. That image contains hidden a
strong sense of sin, of failure and emptiness. Its expression is sarcastic,
full of a rage which does not become blows, but instead is gestures, voices,
movements, and it remains in the air, threatening yet useless. The antipoet
returns to process the disorganization that surrounds him and give form to
society with an arbitrary order. This permits him or her to reduce the world
to the absurd.
I do not know if Parra may have foreseen that his most recriminating and
expository antipoems, with time, have become immobile and are like posters
stuck on certain wall in central homes, forums and public libraries. They
turned in the four winds and determined their deposit. They settled down.
Like good wines, these are navigated poems. I refer to "The Snake," "The
Trap," "The Vices of the Modern World," "The Tables," "Soliloquy of the
Individual." Extensive and transcendent expositions of chaos.
Afterwards, Parra had had to take antipoetry to his extremes, converting
his speeches into axioms; key phrases that represent the direct objectification
of the philosophical absurd and of social anarchy. He has arrived, then, at a
muralistic poetry, a true mural poetry, not that subtlety that the radicals
pasted on the walls of the great city, but instead an activist poetry that
violently writes on the wall in a mood of confrontation. Our equivalent to the
wall inscriptions of the May Revolution in Paris. Parra calls them "Artifacts."
He says, for example:
"In the United States liberty is a statue."
It could have been written with chalk on a wall in Berkeley. If in his
antipoems Parra held to a line of sarcasm, frontal attack on the bourgeois
establishment and demolition of institutions, in his "Artifacts" he removes all
elements of eloquence, all vocal trickery, all suspicion of rhetoric and
didacticism, and is left with those phrases that represent the nude body of
poetry, those words of stone, pure, torn by the roots from the literature and
re-incorporated in the common language, that one which gives the true idea of
existence and not the idea of existence that the writer decrees and adorns so
as to fabricate their own deception and the deception of the naive and the
swindlers.
I insist that Parra isolates and burns the bridges and fills the moats
behind himself. The circle of chalk is now a circle of fire. Within his
poetry Parra is like a frantic woodsman, hatchet in hand, cutting away and
destroying the tree of life to its last vestige. There is becoming little
left. Stumps and smoke and sticks. Scarcely. While he continues to sharpen
his hatchet blade. He had never been so alone, as when other antipoets from
all over appeared and extended their arms. "Thick Work" (1969) suggests a
beginning, a first stage in construction, but in reality it refers to the
pavement, the mix, the nails, the sticks and the cardboard that spin after the
catastrophe. The carpenter is ready, hammer in hand, to pound spikes like
heads.
In the expository tradition of antipoetry (yes, I believe there is that
tradition), the inclined plane where humanity opens and extends like a leather
fur on the floor, they mark the holes and put on a loincloth to hold back the
blood, Nicanor Parra headed on a definite course. I think that Gonzalo Rojas,
Cesar Fernandez Moreno, Ernesto Cardenal and Roque Dalton, among others,
undoubtedly accompany him.
Gonzalo Rojas (1917) was brought up in the Madragon's surrealism alongside
Braulio Arenas, Teofilo Cid, Jorge Caceres, Enrique Gomez Correa. Already in
1948, when his book appears, "Man's Misery," it is evident that Rojas does not
want to fight only with the white arms of Chilean surrealism: chaotic
enumeration, the disintegrative act, the cumulative process of an decorative
anguish. He attacks, instead, certain basic aspects of the human condition
with arms characteristic of antipoetry: the sudden shift, the secret phrase,
sarcasm, the formulas of dogmatic ratiocination. His parentage with Parra is
clear. Perhaps it stems from a common devotion to Vallejo. But those would be
distant parents. It treats more likely a fury and a desperation which grow
together and which are ended by separating them. Both strike at the old door
of the bourgeois home and they strike not to open it, but to throw it down.
They are ferocious destroyers of the institutional. They deal in an erotic,
essentially aggressive "machismo." Parra presents it with irony and takes it
to the limits of cruelty. Rojas wraps it in bags of seminal cargo. The
differences between Parra and Rojas are important. Parra is schematic and
possesses a cyclical sense of form; his perfection is circular; his proceeding
is always allusive and, from there, comes his brilliant consciousness of
reality; with his power of synthesis he acquires an expression that is broader
and, at the same time, more complete than that of Rojas. In Parra's antipoems
one notices a tidy conception of the world (neatly critical) and a firm
consciousness of mankind's limits. Rojas, on the other hand, does not but
outflanks his building; he overflows it. Form is not his fundamental
preoccupation, but the idea and its reverberation, like sunlight upon reality
at noon. Rojas squeezes the poetic object, concentrates it in search of the
seed and later opens it, extends it, shakes out consequences. Parra is a
social critic. Rojas is precisely lyrical and transcendent; he does not shine,
but instead illuminates continually. He is friend of definitions and in them
finds that most provocative in his antipoetry. Let us see.
May those that know know what they can know
and those who are asleep may they still sleep.
Between one sheet and another or, even more quickly
than that, in a snap, we became nude and leaped into the air
already ugly and old, without wings, with the wrinkles of the earth.
Dylan Thomas: the star of alcohol shines for us to see
what we bet, and lost.
Mortal, mortal error
for anyone to do this being born; we are hunger.
One is here without knowing they are not,
causing them to laugh at having entered that
delirious game.
God is no good for me. Nothing for me
is any good for anything.
They speak of a god or they speak of history. I laugh
at having to go so far for an explanation of the hunger
which devours me.
I am, then, the dog that divines the future: I profess.
Take out the deceased. It is time to take away the body
that grew beneath the skin like a wounding vice!(20)
Rojas is narrative, exclamatory, irreverent, close to women upon a mortal
floor, following the path of a fly and chaining his thoughts in a series with
muralistic impact. Examples:
Now in the light and in the speed,
and their soul is a fly that buzzes in the ears
of the newly born.
Cosmonauts, advise us
if that star is real, or is also a line
in the farce.
Not to confound the grubs with the stars:
Oh the old record player of the sophists.
They kill, kill poets to study them.
They eat, continue eating through bibliography.
Books and books, books unto the clouds,
but poetry is written alone.
It is written with the teeth, with the danger,
with the terrible truth of each thing.(21)
A poem like "Why Should We Lie?" is already a decisive proclamation to
surround Rojas' final intention. Just as in Parra's "Vices of the Modern
World," who covers and researches the deeds of mankind and is left for dessert
with a spot on the tie, so Rojas views humanity with an incessant, heavy,
bleeding, sad headlong fall toward the coffin, a sort of silent cinema,
accelerated, infinitely repeated. To say it with anguished sonority, with
defiant sarcasm, is the mark of his antipoetry.
Rojas witnesses the act of his destruction as an individual being; he does
not destroy with his own hand. There is in his poetry a permanence that is not
the effect of the words, yet instead of the movement that he gives them around
his desperation and his solitude.
The antipoetry of Cesar Fernandez Moreno (1919) contrasts with the sacred
and blasphemous oratory that is continued from Pablo de Rokha to Gonzalo Rojas.
Fernandez Moreno, although rendering homage to his father and to Vallejo,
fires, avoids everything that could demoralize him: reflection as much as
pronouncements. He speaks with extreme velocity in a sort of agitated
monologue of one who recounts the film and, recounting it, contradicts it, gets
it wrong, reversed, advanced with flying commentaries. To be the antipoet that
he is, Fernandez Moreno had to change his biography and the history of his
nation. When he lost respect for Argentina (with love, man, with love) he
gave it to himself. He says:
You have seen how many great-great-grandmothers one has -
I accuse seven Spaniards, six natives and three French,
the match will end thus
Hispano-argentine combination, 13, French, three.(22)
From Paris, that is to say, from where come the well-born children hanging
from their carriages, Fernandez Moreno leaps with nonchalance:
Because neither my brothers nor Buenos Aires
were here they brought me from Europe,
they brought me in pieces.(23)
Thus I am in any case
Spanish French Indian who knows
soldier peasant merchant poet "quizas"
rich poor of every and no class
and yet am Argentine.(24)
Fernandez Moreno in search of a place of origin. Hurriedly. Because
Argentina unites and divides. "Hey, of what Argentina do you tell me?"
Of the limits:
our limits already ceased to be limits
they are questions of limits
to the west the question of the Chileans
a type of Argentine furious with themselves.(25)
To the east the question started with Brazil
who took the colony who took from you the colony
a question of a haircut.(26)
About Patagonia:
The only sure thing is that Patagonia sounds like "pata."(27)
...from Patagonia only the gas matters
an endless eruption of gas that Buenos Aires turns pure.(28)
Of the Mar del Plata river:
nevertheless they call it silver
as often the silver sea as the silver river
just as with this so Argentine republic
what a metallic obsession, my lord (29)
From the Atlantic that bathes us:
70,000 kilometers of coast and no restaurant
with a view of the sea.(30)
Of our human quality:
somehow we always lose the final
against the most developed rivals
god is native but the arbiters are foreign (31)
Fernandez Moreno describes the place before the tourist takes the
photograph and the military geographers print the maps, in his domestic portion
of chaos, beyond the monuments and boulevards, beyond stadiums and beaches,
beyond casinos and quarters. Add Gardel, put down tangos and soccer and meat,
mountain range, prairies and Argentinians forever. His roll of film is always
accelerated and is never over. He snarls it, jumps scenes, swats it, but it
continues--how can it continue--with the voice of the neighborhoods, the
retinue at the beck and call of the travelers, the Frenchified and the
cineasts, the commanding voices of the generals and the subordinates (as he
himself says), the slow solitude of the truckers and the final wreck of the
cyclists. His antipoetry is a bazaar. It is also a pianola and a biography of
the barrio. Sired close to the novelists; with Sabato and Cortazar. How he
endeavors to change the sound of the language:
forgive if I speak to you disoriented thus
the ice ices my tongue
yet I keep on uttering that
the Malvinos are Argentine
as they taught me in school (32)
let us sing in the world's jails
the Falklands are British (33)
Just as Sabato is always in the track, the hearing ready to hear pulses
the breadth and the length of the country which still does not awaken.
Fernandez Moreno fights this. The political line runs through his antipoetry
like a subterranean train that, in moments of crisis, departs and blows its
horn in the open stations. Nothing of formulas nor of passwords. Only
exclamations, one like another propaganda mural, remembrances of the Spanish
Civil War, of Peronism and vague plans for the moment of truth. But always a
voice, a tone throughout the poems and antipoems, a pair, firm, remembering
certain anniversaries of long ago, some names and the hands of the people in
the process of lifting itself. This voice never grandstands, on the contrary,
when most serious, least eloquent, when most emotional, most terse, hard and
abrupt. Fernandez Moreno thinks within the chaos that he goes creating. That
could situate him on the less exposed wing of antipoetry. But his penitences
carry force and point. He says:
I want to marry a young lady
with legs crossed in a perfect cross
where I remain trapped
between two stockings that soon end.(34)
This young lady multiplies geographically and erotically. Antipoetry
remembers her in cafes, in taxis, in theaters, restaurants and multifaceted
beds. Not frantically, but instead in cubist foldings, where to each image
there corresponds a hat, a glove, a purse, a stocking, but always the same
belly and the same rubber ring that opens and closes unhurriedly, with
authority and dominion. He says:
I walked along the main road
mixing in with the princesses of my youth
pot-bellied drunks.(35)
It turns me toward suicide
every wrinkle on that grown woman (36)
The Argentine antipoetry, as with other Latin American countries, quickens
the pace in recent years seeking the vanguard where it will carry out its final
attack. From the "cinema" of Fernandez Moreno there remains, at times, the
speed, but not the control of the voice. The verses fall now like bricks into
the water. The anguish is more immediate: it comes from a very real
incarceration, very much at hand, of a miserable village or a disaster, of an
obligatory exile. The revolt is neither announced nor analyzed: it is produced.
The language of solitude is the same as that of the indebted family, the
prisoner, the striker, the wounded on Public Assistance; we do not have a
literature that is transformed into memory; it is immediate reportage, with
hair and expression. What is curious is that the voice sounds like a chorus
from one side of the earth to the other. The demolition noise is universal and
the dust still floating covers the sun. The walls of the Paris May appear in
Mexico. The writing is unmistakable. They also write on the ground.
From outside it one can follow this movement through key publications:
"The Gold Bug" in Argentina, "The Feathered Horn" in Mexico, "G. B." in
Sausalito, "Kayak" in San Francisco, "The Painted Bird" in San Salvador, "The
Belly of the Whale" in Venezuela, "Fire" in London.
In 1965, awarding the work "Mortal Hearsay," by Victor Garcia Robles,
winner the the House of the Americas Contest, Nicanor Parra said the following:
Opening the envelope it was seen with astonishment
that the author is an almost adolescent youth,
apparently unpublished in his own country,
Argentina. And recalling that the other two favored
poets, Jitrik and Szpunberg, are also youths of the
same nationality we should recognize that something
important is happening in the new Argentine poetry,
whose immediate objectives would seem to consist of
the synthesis of the popular and the erudite, the
native and the foreign, the personal and the
collective.(37)
Parra, between the lines, sees a prolongation of his antipoetic line. In
reality, Jitrik, Szpunberg and Garcia Robles share the tendency towards
newsreel, but they add to it the destructive system of Parra and, as such, put
a hole in the boat wherein they sail. The fury comes like the shells of
barreled wine: immobile, impure, absorbing, mortal. No unnecessary expenditure
on munitions. The rope is only long enough to reach the hanged. The antipoets
come directly from the disorder or from the outskirts. The fierce mark is not a
tattoo, was left there by infancy, perfected by adolescence. It was a gift from
the father and the mother to hang up the whole family. When one thinks of
Cortazar and appreciates the humor he lends to the popular language, and thinks
of Borges, who lends it everything, one sees that these youths provide nothing:
they say something and the noise of teeth and of tongues has the same
sharpness, the ferocious sarcasm and the beaten tenderness of the language of
the house in which they were born. See this self-portrait of Garcia Robles, for
example:
I never got off cheap:
the clothing
full of shadows
the coins
dusty.
Never a drop for me;
the time
sold to the devil,
laughter
pawned in a thousand terrible jokes.
It was always my part to dance
with the most painted monkey:
the tenderness won at blows,
the heart eaten by dogs.
Yes, it seems a lie:
the more I look,
the more darkness I find.
The more I descend
through the deep days,
the more stones I have.
It is not something to joke about...(38)
There is something that sounds like Vallejo, not coincidentally; it is
wheat from the same field, plea presented to the same god, body broken in the
same joints. Garcia Robles hits. He strikes hard.
If some pain overwhelms,
dizzies you, take
crying the burning of your bones,
cloud over,
seasonally rain,
thunder,
but do not forget
that the pain no is no
more than pain
out of season,
that one storm
does not make a summer, here
or anywhere else.(39)
Then I saw the bourgeois arrive:
-O, old friend, you belong to us,
we have given you food year after year and educated
with care your evanescent culture, and with respect
we have ironed the implacable lapels of your suit,
we the happy ones,
happiest of parties
we party
seated with a plastic napkin on the ass,
ten rings and the deadly foxtrot
one finger short of the void,
we sing like buttery eunuchs
celebrating ashes,
we sing celebrating our contemptible
lucha for vida.(40)
The light that Garcia Robles seeks he finds slicing to shreds the great
sacred shadows of his neighborhood. He sticks to the everyday pattern where
the neighbors come together to pick over the bones of the student. But where
he strikes true longings and draws responses is in his poem, "Know what happens
with live tears and bad words." The title is an exact summary of the poem: a
counterpoint of tears and insults. It gives me a sense of how the new
generation feels when it runs throwing accusations in front of embassies and
imperialist companies, tearing trees and stands from the plazas, breaking
lampposts, crying and stinging from the tear gas, to end in a police barracks
beneath a rain of clubs. The race through the city streets is called
impotence. The discourse before the newsstand draws tears. The sentry of
order listens with a club in his hand. Does the country cause you pain, young
man? This blow should hurt you more. With little bombs for us? So says the
oilman, the broker, the importer, the wheat lord and the cold lumberman. Take
this little taste of napalm under consideration. You could. The young
antipoet then says:
Yesterday while I wrote another poem
tears fell from my eyes
you know, they fell like a quarrel,
I heard inside my head the soccer ball kicks,
the shouts of the ardent fans,
even while I was writing a poem
I put my hands in my pockets
looking for the last peso,
the tears fell which hurt me,
while I thought of the railway strike,
the mobilization, the rise of the dollar...(41)
but the radio tells us: -Agrarian reform was approved-,
and the radio gives the names of the political prisoners,
the radio tells us who killed Satanowsky and Ingalinella,
the radio tells us a load,
sticks in boleros and questions and answers,
the papers are the same,
what the heck good are the papers,
they focus on the east,
they focus on the west.
the magazines distract us with various old tales.(42)
They name what they must: the miserable villages, and Loeb, Shell,
Standard Oil, the aircraft carriers, the liberating Revolution and draw their
conclusions. What is happening, they say, is that they are "butchering" the
country:
They are so many sons of a great whore
who laugh at the son and at the earth,
at loves,
at happiness,
at the black depths of the plowed fields,
at the necessary wheat, for bread and barbecues,
they do not care about the hands
of the women and the infants,
the babies, for shame!
nor the dark hands of work...
They are so many suits who love no one,
who have not blood,
who will be repaid one of these days.(43)
"Atenti Springtime" clearly establishes the orbit of this antipoetry;
Garcia Robles does not accept being alone, does not shut himself off to snip at
his patterned stitching nor to prepare a hole nor search for lime. On the
contrary, his antipoetry grows like a plant in a great neighborhood garden. It
needs a springtime without disasters, without downpours, selective,
revolutionary; not just any that "exposes both the victim and the executioner,"
that arrives by Cadillac to the meticulous picnic. It will be the people's
springtime, a "Sunday that lasts for months":
Fertile proletariat,
you have to be
our lovely word,
you have to be
our best smile,
you have to be,
sister, companion,
our best grounds for happiness! (44)
As a result, it seems that in this case antipoetry strips away poetry to
describe a new way of speaking to man of justice and of caring, the way that
the virtuosos had seduced, undressed, violated and buried; not a new way,
therefore, yet instead the only true one, reborn.
This makes me think of the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal (1925), who
work is one of the most direct and violently anti-rhetorical expressions that I
know. Cardenal not only has disarmed the precious idiom of the modernist and
post-modernist Central Americans, he also did away with the myth of the
creative image, unearthed metaphor, incorporated the popular way of speaking.
His symbols arch like a dark curve seeking the indigenous past. On the
immediate level one could believe that those symbols function in his antipoetry
like the Mayan allusions of Asturias. Error. Asturias' references are
mythological and occult; the asseverations of Cardenal are contemporary, social
and political. Not even in his master poem, "Dubious Straits" (Madrid:
Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1966), where the historical and the geographical
are interwoven at times in surrealist trances and where there are frequent
mystical lapses and brief visions, like light signals upon a lake, Cardenal
loses sight of the immediate mood stretching like a trap at his feet. Jose
Coronel Urtecho, presenting this book, says:
Leaving aside the allusions and the symbols relating
to realities mentioned there, especially the
symbolic opposition of earth and water in the road
or way to Cathay and province of Mango, where we
find the Heavenly City--the poetry of Ernesto
Cardenal is voluntarily opposed to all types of
symbolism, true with austerity to the immediate
exterior reality, or as he himself likes to say, an
exteriorist poetry.(45)
Coronel Urtecho leaves it without saying something of most importance:
that "exteriorism" is never decorative, nor even is pictorial (as an objective
image or reality), serves not to place each thing in its place, but instead
totally the contrary: its dynamism derives from the disorder which carries the
real world, from the absurd and the anger that serves as its ground and, above
all, from the essential love of life and of man which comprise his transcendent
trap.
Cardenal is a harsh and dissonant antipoet who tries to ignite the prosaic
with an internal call in order to provoke other fires around him; he is a namer
of things and beings, confounder of history, transmuter, revolver. He acts with
impetuous revolutionary force. His best lines are barbs directed at those who
accost him and dirty the life on his solitary island; imperialism, fascist
barbarism, military dictatorship, the Coca-Cola and the face adorned with
knives and beads. He has the bitter hardness of Brother Antoninus, the Beat
North American priest, but whereas he insists on doing God's writing through
trances and twists his expression in search of a violent beauty, Cardenal
discovers a truth in the material that will not necessarily be beautiful but
which is transcendent beneath the breath of the common man. That is the root of
his antipoetry.
Cardenal, therefore, like the Argentinian, Colombian (I refer to nihilists
like J. Mario--see his poem "Mr. T. S. Eliot has died, etc." in "The Feathered
Horn," no.17, Jan. 1966, p.47), Venezuelan, Salvadorean, and Cuban, combat on
the plane of the social revolution with weapons conquered in the anti-literary
revolution; they use antipoetry to unmask, attack, purify. Thence the
importance attained by poems in his work like "Mouse from a Cartoon" and,
particularly, "Kayanerenhkowa."(46) In the first of these he says:
The singing men are dispersed.
The jaguars have been decorated.
Military Juntas on mountains of skulls
and buzzards eating eyes
The sacrifice-by-removing-human-hearts dictator
Miss Guatemala assassinated
by the "White Hand"
And I came to address United Fruit Co., came to address
the little man, the widow, the miserable.
They have eaten Quetzal, have eaten him fried.
Have not we been disgraced enough yet?
We govern to return the money to the people so they said
And do you know perhaps of our holidays, of the stars?
the Calendar
like refuse.
In "Kayenerenhkowa," the allusion is less direct, but his social intention
is unequivocal:
The cormorant comes from Michigan
to Solentiname
here they call it pig-duck.
Yes, like the airplanes.
The plane from New York above these solitudes.
Perhaps viewing a film in color
ME AND THEM IN PARIS with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh
above Solentiname.
And they keep
flying in a V
the Canadian ducks
Will they come from Lake Ontario?
Stay. The lake calm. Of the soul. And an autumn moon.
Sept. 25th. The first pelicans, three, near La Venada
flying close to the water.
Tanagers from Ohio. From Kentucky.
Like the letter from Merton on Tuesday.
And the Kennedy Airport so close to Solentiname.
A radio on an island in the Caribbean Indies.
(Saba brought me oranges)
We all shall eat from the same plate
a local meat.
Suddenly in the woods a bonfire, loads shifting
between the fire and the shadow, and the shadows shifting
tan-tan, tan-tan, red tattoos
redder now that the constellation rises, om.
also children and dogs jumping
girls with shells, with
wampum. Ah om. The blaze extinguishes.
They left. And were never seen again in history.
Antipoetry in the service of the revolution: in this enterprise,
alongside Cardenal, is Roque Dalton, the Salvadorean who has done the greater
part of his work in Mexico and in Cuba. In his first books Dalton moves among
surrealist roots searching for luminosities and rhythms in familiar, regional,
everyday allusions. The tone of voice possesses a noble, tragic quality. The
image disarms, sets countries, persons, schools, churches spinning; a youthful
tenderness seeks the abuse, as in the antipoetry of Vallejo, and receives it so
as to continue offering itself. Dalton's ascent awakens echoes of other poetic
worlds in which the adolescent seeks his nocturnal sunlight. It reminds me of
the early poetry of the Chilean Enrique Lihn. In any event, Dalto later adopts
the imagist net, Gothic, and he covers it--not destroys it--with a social
indictment as strong and aggressive as that of Cardenal. His revolutionary
student experience, his prisoners and exiles, his young women who shared the
clandestine movement in the Americas and Europe, the familiar ground, the faces
of colonels and cops, the green banana Mafia, the siege of imperialist rifles
in Santo Domingo, are mingled in his antipoetry and what it Mexico would be a
plain youthful ballad (47) is at once converted to an imprecation, cry,
expectation of a great battle that approaches. From Cuba, Dalton combines
nationhood with choleric voices:
Dispersed nation: you fall
like a poison wafer into my hours.
Who are you, full of loves
like the dog who scratches on the same trees
where he pees? Who carried your symbols,
your gestures of service smelling of mahogany,
knowing you demolished by drunken babble?
He recounts history as a polluted well:
Hernan Cortes was an irritable syphilitic
stinking of raw leather in his moments of leisure
avenger of his thugs
in each Mayan astronomer whose eyes he ordered out.
A man dressed in loose fatigues
and odors of the fine outcome of the bitter wine...(48)
History is a well
full of marginal types
who came like earthquakes
or orangutans with torches
to be included next to the big blue lakes
with lung disease spas
and block the shapes of the statuary
and the background mountains
of little wise, intriguing prostitutes
who make one forget the prairie heartbreaks
the demise of quiet woods
of dusty and dull towns
that hide in their scent
the presence of the sea.(49)
He addresses his god with the cynical, tired, compassionate voice of the
antipoets:
Of course that is the way it is, buddy. My god
created man in his image and in his resemblance.
But He created him on Saturday, reeling from
impotent drunkenness and when his image took on an
excessive aspect. That is why we have tears, a
propensity to hate and other tracks for thirst and
love. Which is humbling, buddy, humbling.(50)
Dalton focuses on the buzzing, worships Vallejo and crucifies him in an
implacable self-portrait pierced by an arrow next to the bloody visages of his
parents.(51)
Reading Dalton, Cardenal, Garcia Robles, Fernandez Moreno, Rojas, Parra,
thinking of de Rokha and Vallejo, one begins to draw their conclusions:
antipoetry, which has been an anarchic activity, an anti-rhetorical mantle,
appeared with a direct and violent language and began to return mankind to the
reality it had lost, not piecemeal, like market theft, but instead all at once.
The internal violence became an attack on and punishment of contemporary
society, the anguished metaphysic of a confrontation between neighbor and
neighbor, as they say "vis a vis," with a god who they consider preoccupied,
enclosed, on the point of perishing beneath the assault along with subjects and
objects in revolt; the father has returned seeking the son's wife, who hides
her; the woman closed as a tomb, toiling in a pile of certificates and
testaments. The fly buzzes around the scene of the crime.
These are, then, the keys to antipoetry in its first phases, its coat of
arms. God on one side of the shield, whose work is reviewed in light of the
familiar defeats, without any decoration, alone in the scene, friendly and
feeling distraught, as when speaking to a drunken friend; on the other side,
the Mosca that already did away with the angels and the swans.
So then, the most recent antipoetry, that which follows the Cuban
Revolution, introduces certain operational changes into the system of
violence: the fly does not disappear, but is a sign of the bourgeois
pestilence and of international flight; the duty of every revolutionary is to
make revolution; the divine comes down from the cross and gets on his
motorcycle and sings, smokes the good herb gilded in Acapulco,
amuses his girlfriends, confronts the police. The violence is turned against
the imperialist establishment, against the local thieves, against the
neo-Fascist cartel, against the embargo on conscience, and for agrarian reform.
The Third World has been born.
From the surrealist dawn antipoetry has come carrying tools and the
components of a time bomb. Meanwhile the time of Molotov cocktails augmented.
The antipoets end by negating their own selves, they become emblems of one
country or another, they take the crossbar off the door; along the street is
coming their revolution.
Notes
1 Citation from "La Poesia Hispanoamicana" by E. Florit and J. O. Jimenez, New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968, pp.190-91.
2 Ibid, p.194.
3 Ibid. p.334.
4 "Altazor," Santiago Chile: Cruz del Sur Press, 1949, p.31. All the citations
are from the same edition.
5 Ibid., p.40.
6 Ibid., p.72.
7 Ibid., p.57.
8 Ibid., p.58.
9 Cite from "Antologia, 1916-1953," Santiago, Chile: Multitud, 1954, p.9.
10 "U," 1927: p.62.
11 Ibid., pp.63-65,67-68,71,75.
12 Quote from "Complete Poems, 1918-1938, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 2d
ed., 1949, p.23.
13 Ibid., p.50.
14 Ibid., p.61.
15 To Vallejo Borges' poem, "Self-portrait" applies well.
16 Ibid., p.85.
17 Ibid., p.88.
18 Ibid., pp.94,98,99,107,153,158,161,169.
19 "Poems and Antipoems," Santiago Chile: Nascimento, 1954, pp.78,141.
20 "Against Mortality," Santiago Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1964,
pp.14,15,16,17,25,26,32,34. The title of this work that absorbs the essence of
Rojas' first book, "Man's Misery," shows that the poet remains true to his
roots: "Against Mortality" is a subtitle of Andre Breton's in the first
"Surrealist Manifesto" (1924); and Vallejo, in "Spain remove from
me this chalice" says: Only mortality with perish! Volunteers--for the
good, for the living. Defeat defeat!
21 Ibid., pp.23,47,51,53.
22 My citations from "Argentina to the End" are from: "Line Anthology of
Argentine Poetry," Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1968, p.361.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., p.364.
25 C. F. M., "The Airports," Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1967,
p.130.
26 Ibid., p.131.
27 Ibid., p.133.
28 Ibid., p.158.
29 Ibid., p.135.
30 Ibid., p.136.
31 Ibid., p.156.
32 Ibid., p.133.
33 Ibid., p.134.
34 Ibid., p.23.
35 Ibid., p.30.
36 Ibid., p.63.
37 Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1965.
38 Ibid., p.41.
39 Ibid., p.37.
40 Ibid., p.171-2.
41 Ibid., p.135.
42 Ibid., p.137.
43 Ibid., p.142-3.
44 Ibid., p.194.
45 Ibid., p.25.
46 "The Feathered Horn," nos.24 and 28, Oct. 1967, Oct. 1968, pp. 26 and 96.
47 "The window in the face," 1961.
48 Ibid., p.85.
49 Ibid., p.92.
50 Ibid., p.121.
51 See pp.90, 99, 116, 166.